I’d like to be able to search contacts by first name and last name. And middle name. And birthday. And employee id. While you’re at it, add spouse name, comments, city, country, phone number (all of them) and freight terms.

So, what a smart CRM consultant to do? Open Quick Find Active Contacts view and use Add Find Columns button to add a smorgasbord of the columns:

That’s Spießrutenlaufen right there.

What a smarter CRM consultant to do? Explain to the customer that adding a single column introduces a performance penalty that will be amplified as the database grow.

For example, in one of the recent cases we had a CRM database with approximately 500K contacts, simple search was taking close to 30 seconds. After discussing the issue with the business, we reduced number of fields from 15 to 4 (first and last names, email, internal id). Even a wildcard search takes less 2 seconds now.

Whether you’re building a salad or a CRM system, restraint yourself, people, when it comes to the ingredient count.